Letter: Mark Frankland obituary

Keith Morris writes: Colin Smith's admirable obituary of Mark Frankland (25 April) mentioned Frankland's book The Patriot's Revolution – How Eastern Europe Toppled Communism and Won Its Freedom. Its prologue described his first encounter with communism at the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955 and the smuggling out of a young Pole, Stash Pruszynski, with us on the luggage rack of the train on the return journey across Poland and Czechoslovakia.

We were a group of 12 students, 11 from Cambridge and one from Oxford, and probably the only non-communists in a British delegation of 1,300. Frankland's extraordinary coolness and presence of mind saved the day at two critical points, and without him we would have certainly spent an uncomfortable, unplanned stay behind the iron curtain.

In 1995, nine of the 12, including Frankland, returned to Warsaw at the invitation of Pruszynski, by then back home as a restaurateur, and we all paid tribute to Frankland's leadership, which had been, of course, of the most unassuming kind. He would have none of it but was happy to be back in a free Poland.